Tron

13

OVERCOMING HIS SURPRISE at the Solar Sailer’s acceleration, Tron hauled himself to his feet. He started back to where Yori manipulated the vessel’s controls on the bridge, treading the catwalk lightly, watching the landscape slide by below at tremendous speed. Then something caught his eye and he paused, poising for battle, ready to bring forth his disk.

Yori, seeing it, called, “Tron, are you all right?”

He waved to indicate that he was, but said nothing, moving to the rail. Red fingers gripped it, in a precarious hold. One of Sark’s Elite had somehow managed to cling to the rail. Tron peered over it and saw him dangling there, legs thrashing in a futile attempt to secure a foothold and draw himself onto the catwalk.

Tron had his disk out now. Without compunction, he raised it, intending to bring it down on the hands and send the Red back to nothingness.

The Red looked up in panic; Tron recognized him just as he yelped, “It’s me! Flynn!”

His eyes were wide, riveted to the disk which threatened to smash his hands from the rail. “Flynn!” Tron yelled, amazed, replacing the disk on his back.

Flynn gave an embarrassed grin. “Greetings, program!” he panted.

“You’re alive,” Tron said, turning that concept over in his mind and seeing that no fact was absolute.

“Yeah, I—oooops!” He’d begun to lug himself up again, but his grasp had slipped. Tron’s hands were at his wrists instantly, hauling him up while Flynn’s boots scrabbled against the Sailer’s hull for purchase. Tron’s strength surprised him, even for a Champion; Flynn found himself drawn up over the rail with relative ease. He collapsed against the bulwark, breathing rapidly, watching the electronic landscape go by. It had been a close scrape; he had several ideas about how software-engineering-degree programs should be broadened, for survival’s sake.

Sark’s intuition about Tron’s whereabouts had been correct. From what Flynn had been able to gather, the Command Program had quickly surmised that Tron and whoever was with him would seek the very fastest means of getting out of the City, and that had meant the Solar Sailer. By shuffling forward at the right moment, head lowered, Flynn had gotten himself selected as one of the Reds assigned to face to the Factory Complex to reinforce the guards there. The balance of his detachment had returned to the Carrier, apparently at the express order of the MCP. He and the Reds among whom he’d been hiding—many of them unknown to one another, allowing him to go unnoticed—had arrived just as Tron had been hijacking the Sailer. Racing along the catwalk to conk a Memory Guard, he’d been the victim of Tron’s ferocity.

As Flynn leaned against the bulwark, he had time to reassert control over the energies and fields that constituted his body in the Electronic World. He focused his concentration; the Red glow faded; he returned to his former appearance. Tron watched in fascination, speculating once more on just who Flynn was and where he’d come from.

“Who is this?” asked a voice Flynn recognized. He turned and saw Yori, the eyes and the lips and the prepossessing lines of her face. He silently mouthed, Lora! But he saw his mistake in an instant, and kept himself from naming her. But he took a step toward her and Tron, not sure why he did, interposed himself with an uncertain smile.

“Flynn,” Tron explained to the shimmering woman, as Flynn saw that they were a bonded pair and thought again what a strange mirror the System was. “Where’s Ram?” Tron finished, turning back to him.

Memory came in a flood, saddening the reunion. “I’m sorry, Tron. He’s—he didn’t make it.”

Tron lowered his head sadly, remembering the last concussion of the tank’s cannonfire, the havoc of it. He’d written off both Flynn and Ram; odd now, to feel Ram’s death all over again, with even more intensity. Flynn was thinking that he had at least found Tron, as Ram had urged him with his final breath.

Tron set aside grief, turning to Yori. “This is Flynn, the one who set me free.” That wasn’t quite the way things happened, but Flynn accepted the compliment with a grin, as she gave him an appraising look; Yori’s reserved gratitude was worth more than effusive thanks from some other. She was a revelation to him: her essence was that of Lora, transfigured into a radiant creature, still very much like the woman he remembered.

“Then, I owe you some thanks,” she said after a moment.

Flynn dismissed it with a rather dashing shrug. “No big deal. I ought to know my way around that light-cycles routine. I mean, I did write the program for it.” Even if Dillinger got the stock options and the promo! he amended to himself. That brought him back to problems at hand.

Now Tron was looking at him, troubled. Flynn has a way of using the most peculiar phrases, it occurred to him. Yet, he could see that Flynn had made no slip, and that there was more to it than that. “Wrote the?…”

“It’s time I leveled with you, Tron,” Flynn admitted, hoping they’d be able to accept it. “I’m a—well, I’m what you guys call a User.”

No trumpets or drums, no light from on high; just an ordinary-looking program in conscript’s armor. They gaped at him. A small part of Yori reasoned that part of the awe surrounding the Users was that they’d always been unseen; they had, for her, always conjured up mental images of huge, imperious beings, powerful and wise beyond belief, pursuing incomprehensible ends, shaping the System. Flynn did not quite measure up to that.

But he was, undeniably, not just another program; she’d heard of him from Tron, and seen him shed his Red aura. She could not hold back all of her awe. “A User? In our World?”

Flynn nodded sheepishly. “Guess I took a wrong turn somewhere.”

Tron labored with this revelation. It implied so much about the System, about purpose and function and the Users that he couldn’t deal with all the doubts and questions that poured into his mind. And then again, regarding a former cellmate as a deity would take some getting used to. “But,” he said slowly, “if you’re a User, then everything you’ve done has been part of a plan?”

Flynn chortled, unaware of how much it shocked and alarmed Tron. “You wish! Man, I haven’t had a second to think since I got down here. I mean, in here.” He suddenly looked baffled. “Out here. Whatever.”

Tron struggled to deal with that. Yori scrutinized Flynn curiously, accepting his claim for the time being, reserving final judgment. “Then…” Tron began, but let it trail off.

Flynn, exasperated and feeling a little guilty without understanding why he did, saw that he’d better make matters as plain as he could, to avoid confusion and keep them from assuming he was something he wasn’t. He didn’t want them relying on his nonexistent divinity if it came time to show hands. “Look, you guys know how it is. You just keep doin’ what it looks like you’re supposed to, even if it seems crazy, and you hope to Hell your User knows what’s going on.” There was curious satisfaction in having encapsulated the only truth he’d learned in either World.

Tron was still dubious. “Well, that’s how it is for programs, yes, but—”

“I hate to disappoint you, pal,” Flynn interrupted him, “but most of the time, that’s how it is for Users, too.”

“Stranger and stranger,” Tron mused, wondering where the hierarchies ended. Yori was speculating on how Flynn’s continued presence promised to change the System utterly, MCP or no MCP.

“So,” Flynn resumed; patting Tron on the back, taking in the Solar Sailer, “nice ship you got here. What’s our next move?”

Under the circumstances, Tron was not unsurprised to find that he was still in charge. “Remember, you wanted to pay a call on the MCP?” And Flynn’s expression confirmed. “We’re on our way.” Tron held up the altered disk. “Alan-One gave me the coding we need to go up against Master Control.”

Good goin’ Bradley! thought Flynn, and laughed. “Awright! Thank God Alan stayed awake, at least!” Again they were at a loss. The casual use of Alan-One’s name, the easy familiarity of it, scandalized Tron.

Meantime, Yori considered what Flynn had just said, asking herself, thank who?

Sark’s Carrier cruised the System’s skies, hunting. The Command Program stood alone in thought, gazing out the broad pane of the bridge’s observation window. He knew that the key to the Solar Sailer lay in her need to use the network of transmission beams that divided those skies, but the beams constituted a tremendously complicated webwork covering much of the System. And Tron hadn’t been foolish enough to head directly for the Central Computer Area; the User Champion might be coming by any of a great number of possible routes. The Carrier must bear the major part of the responsibility for search and apprehension; Recos were too slow and short-range to be of much use. But: that Tron would come, Sark was positive.

And there was another possibility for intercepting the fugitives soon; Master Control was giving the transmission-beam network its attention, attempting to get a fix on the Sailer and interfere with her operation if possible. Sark repressed his impatience, his desire to come to a reckoning with Tron. He berated himself for not having had the User Champion brought before him on the Game Grid long ago, and slain him. But he’d always found Tron to be a curiosity, and so had increased the odds gradually, to find out precisely where the breaking point would come.

Except that instead of breaking down, Tron had broken out.

Sark’s lieutenant spoke from behind him, quiet and diffident. “Sir, what do you want done with the Tower Guardian, Dumont? Put him in with the others?”

“No, bit-brain,” the Command Program growled. He whirled on his subordinate with a brittle smile. “Prepare him for inquisition. I need a little relaxation.” The idea soothed him; punishing Dumont would be a pleasant diversion until he had Tron in hand. “But first, rez up the Carrier for pursuit.”

He considered his humbled lieutenant. The program might be loyal, but then again, it wouldn’t do to have his servants taking the initiative. Sark’s own status with the Master Control Program was too fragile right then to allow for possible rivals. “And one more thing,” he finished balefully. “Don’t think anymore. I do the thinking around here.”

The fear and foreboding in the lieutenant’s face reassured him. Quailed, the officer scurried off to do the Command Program’s bidding. Sark returned to his contemplations in a more positive frame of mind.

Flynn studied the Sailer with great interest, reveling in her. He recognized her, now that he’d had the leisure to, as a simulation for a videogame, one drawn from NASA concepts but operating, here in the System, on different principles from a true Solar Sailer’s. At any rate, Flynn was inclined to wager that it wasn’t photons pushing her along.

The transmission beam entered the wide muzzle of the receiver in the afterbody far astern, to emerge from the ship’s bow projector. In between, as far as Flynn could make out, it filled the gleaming metallic sails and drove the vessel at amazing speed, all in some invisible manner. The details of her construction were as fascinating as the Solar Sailer’s motive power. What, for example, was he to make of the free-floating steps between catwalk and bridge, which stayed conscientiously in place, hanging in the air, without benefit of support or bracing? Only that they’re not the weirdest things I’ve seen, he concluded, which he couldn’t have said until recently.

He turned to Tron, who sat next to Yori as she piloted, his arm around her shoulders. He still looked strangely at Flynn, uncertain what to think or say about some of the things he’d heard, or even what questions to ask. “What about our friend Sark?” Flynn asked.

Tron ruminated on that. “Probably decided not to pursue us,” he concluded. The Carrier could never overtake the Sailer; Sark’s probable move, if he was still extant, would be to mount guard over the Central Computer Area. And Sark had failed the Master Control Program, not once but several times; it might have lost patience with him. “Programs have a way of just… disappearing, here.”

“Not us, I hope,” Flynn offered, seriocomedic.

Tron shook his head and held up his disk. “Not with this.” It was shining in his hand as if impatient to perform its office. Tron looked to his mate and pilot. “I’m going to check on the beam connection, Yori. You two can keep a watch out for grid bugs.”

Tron paced forward along the slender catwalk that still seemed awfully insubstantial to Flynn, though he knew it to be amazingly sturdy. He gazed after Tron, asking himself what in the world a grid bug was, and hoping that the beam connection—to which he’d given no thought whatsoever until this moment—was healthy and sound. He sure didn’t want to see the Solar Sailer jump her fails, or whatever the term might be.

He looked to Yori. “You know the territory?”

She nodded. “A little.”

Flynn, scanning the terrain below, pointed to a region that was unlit, apparently blighted, its features all two-dimensional and meaningless. He pointed to it. “What’s wrong with that area?”

She rose up a little in the pilot’s seat, saw, and replied with sadness: “The MCP blasted it. There are very few Domains left with any power at all.”

He searched in all directions over the Game Sea, the expanse of liquid coming beneath the Sailer. With the exception of the blasted area, the Sea now stretched in all directions, phosphorescent, before them. It was lustrous, with breaking swells of multiple colors, horsetails of light, spray that resembled myriad stars. A strange, beautiful, mysterious place; he recalled the flatlands, the Factory Domain, the System as he’d seen it from high overhead on his descent, the stupendous megastructure of the Training Complex. The Electronic World was grotesque and menacing at times, but he couldn’t deny that it was beautiful, enthralling at others.

No man had ever seen a more bizarre place, or had a more fantastic adventure. But if all went well, if the light was green at the Central Computer Area and Tron’s disk worked out, Flynn supposed he’d be redigitized right away. With a million questions unanswered and the bulk of this cosmos unvisited, he would go home. It surprised him how much he regretted that part of it.

“They say there are creatures out on this sea,” Yori was telling him. “Huge grid-eaters, and data pirates.”

“Terrific,” Flynn opined wryly; maybe going directly home wasn’t such a bad idea after all. “Can’t wait to meet them.”

Yori had returned to her piloting. “Well, in any case, this beam can outpace anything on the Sea, including Sark’s Carrier.”

Thinking about interception courses rather than an aerial drag race, Flynn refrained from comment. The Game Sea, opalescent currents pulling colors this way and that through it, slid by underneath.

Tron stood on the very edge of the Sailer’s forebody, straddling the bow and the beam-emission device itself, the vomiting of power. He held his disk before him, looking down at it, summoning to mind the words of Alan-One, trying to fathom the secrets of its modifications.

The transmission beam issued from the Solar Sailer, beyond the limits of Tron’s vision. At varying distances and angles, other beams intersected it or ran by it in skew fashion, an exotic web of power and speed. Satisfied that the vessel’s beam connection was secure, he drew back, putting all his concentration into the cast. He released, and the disk skimmed out from the ship, up and up, until it was nearly lost to sight.

The disk spun and flew, strobing its power, guided by his throw and will, rising. Tron followed the cast, studied it, evaluated every aspect of it. He hoped that it would serve the purpose for which Alan-One had refurbished it, and that his throw, when the time came, would be fast and accurate. All that Flynn had said, all this talk of Users, Tron knew, he must set aside. He could afford to harbor no doubts, no ambivalence, when time came to use the disk. There must be only Warrior, weapon, and target.

His disk had slowed now; it returned smoothly, as he’d intended. He watched it, squinting, evaluating. The disk picked up speed on its descent, as if keen to return to him. Tron reached out; it slammed into his hand with reassuring impact and a starburst of energy. He held it so for a moment, inspecting it once more, deciding at last that he’d found no fault in it or in his control. Tron was content; Flynn’s being or not being a User was unimportant in this regard. No doubt or revelation had impaired his ability to use the weapon given him by Alan-One.

The Carrier scouted over the Game Sea as it moved toward the Central Computer Area; Sark’s evaluation of the strategic situation was little different from Tron’s. Still, his crew attended their instruments closely and kept vigilant watch from posts on the bridge and elsewhere aboard.

In the craft’s interior, in a compartment reserved for Sark’s most dire work, Dumont was experiencing sensations he hadn’t known in a very long time: shock, fear, and, worst of all, pain. He was no longer the part-program, part-mechanism he had been in the Input/Output Tower. Bereft of his special status, his power drained, he’d reverted to a more conventional-looking sort of program, elderly, arrayed in flowing robes. But he was haggard, and spent from learning the torment of Sark’s inquisition.

Memory Guards’ staffs against his chest, he was imprisoned in two foot sockets that sizzled with punishing blasts, bringing pain that threatened his hold on sanity. But Dumont, face grooved and contorted with determination, denied them any added satisfaction, any show of surrender. It demanded every shred of willpower he could muster to keep from screaming, from begging them to stop, even though that would have done him no good. The ancient, seamed face was hardened with resolve. Another surge of excruciating power climbed from the boot sockets, bringing tortured convulsions; the guards kept him pinned to the wall with their staffs. And still there was no outcry from Dumont; that one thing, he’d sworn to deny them.

He was in a cell in the Carrier’s capacious brig. Above him, the old program knew, Sark gazed down with vast enjoyment, delighting in the spectacle of suffering. Dumont’s eyes, screwed tightly shut during the ordeal of the energy blasts, opened slowly, with great effort. He glanced up at the Command Program, knowing how Sark savored the scene. Cast down from his Guardianship, reduced to helplessness, Dumont vowed that Sark would not have the satisfaction of seeing him break.

“Had enough?” asked the looming, helmeted figure above. The question had little meaning; there was only one way in which this process would end. Dumont lifted his pain-racked, infinitely tired eyes, nearly at the end of his resources.

He croaked upward, “What do you want? I’m busy.”

Anger flared from the hateful face; Dumont knew a fleeting, intense triumph. Sark’s win wasn’t complete so long as the old program refused to give in. The rage that crept into the response indicated that. “Busy dying, you worn-out excuse for a program!” The air seemed charged with Sark’s anger. Dumont took meager comfort from that.

“Yes, I’m old,” Dumont admitted, as much to himself as to Sark. Grown old in the service of the Users, grown weary in the ceaseless functioning of the System, grown disillusioned with the wrongs he’d seen. He’d thought he had acquired the necessary defenses to coexist with the MCP and Sark. But somehow Tron and Yori’s idealism, their hope, had stripped those away. The Guardian was surprised at how lightly this ultimate disaster, the storm of Sark’s vengeance, weighed on his sense of self-preservation. Dumont knew he would soon be de-rezzed, but felt that he had rescued a certain part of himself.

Now he looked up again. “Old enough to remember the MCP when he was just a chess program,” he added. His voice gathered certainty, though its volume rose only a little; Sark listened despite himself. “He started small and he’ll end up small,” finished Dumont.

Though Sark recovered almost instantly, there had been that moment’s doubt on his face that made it all worthwhile for Dumont. “That’s very funny, Dumont. Maybe I should keep you around, just to make me laugh.”

And with that, another piercing blast came from the foot sockets. Dumont threw his head back in anguish and, in the all-embracing torment, lost the contentment he’d drawn from goading Sark, regretted it, disavowed it, and wished only for the suffering to end. But when it ended, Dumont, fully aware that his inquisition had only begun, drew peace from the knowledge that he’d thrown his tormentor off stride, if only momentarily, with the truth.

Then the sockets hummed again; the agony returned. Dumont was disfigured with it, misshapen, weeping. He wished only for the nothingness of de-rezzing. But one side of him marked how peculiar it was to feel a sense of satisfaction at having helped Tron and Yori in their hopeless mission, a sense of pride in having done his best in a World gone mad.